Parent Brag Sheets for College? SMH

This year back to school time is more bittersweet than usual for me (ok, who am I kidding–it’s not usually bittersweet because I’m always glad that school is back in session and summer is over) because this is my daughter’s last year of high school. A year from now, I’ll be crying my eyes out as she heads to college (fingers crossed)…and also from the college bills I’ll be starting to rack up.

I can’t help but feel like I’m in a cohort of parents that will possibly be the one of the last to have to worry as much about student debt, because I honestly believe that a decade from now, more universities will be offering degrees online at a substantial discount over traditional tuition rates. Georgia Institute of Technology is about to offer an online Master’s degree program, for a “fraction of the on-campus cost;” it’s only a matter of time until universities begin to offer the same for undergrad programs.

If the cost of college isn’t daunting enough, the applications process and related ridiculousness is enough to make me wish I could fast-forward through this period of our lives to a time when obsessing over SATs and being forced to do “parent brag sheets” to help my kid get into college (I am dead serious) is a distant–and laughable–memory. Really? Do we honestly live in a time where parent brag sheets for college are a real thing? Because being a helicopter parent up to and apparently through college is the world that you have to live in, even if you’re not a helicopter parent?

Which brings me to the sort-of related news that LinkedIn is rolling out University pages and apparently thinks they have a shot of luring teens to the site. Yep, now teens as young as 14 can join LinkedIn–because surely LinkedIn is a social network that will be appealing to teens, even as they desert Facebook because it’s all grownups and ads. I guess LinkedIn has already annoyed every living grown up with it’s gamified “endorsements” and other ploys to draw traffic to the site and needs to draw new users. Do they honestly think that teens are going to start using LinkedIn? In a non-jokey way, that is–I’m if teens do start flocking to the site, we’ll start seeing a rash of endorsements for “twerking” or “thigh gap” (can you tell I have two teenagers?).

So that’s what’s going on in my world….happy almost end of summer and may you never have to do a parent brag sheet to help your kid get into college.